Slimejam
A personal weblog written by Christopher Miles, an author and website developer living in Melbourne, Australia.
Regular topics include books and publishing, technology and the internet, parenting, and Doctor Who.
Every writer is two people (at least). There’s the one that does the writing, and the one that has an egg for breakfast. I’m the other one.
Margaret Atwood on the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, quoted in the New York Times in the context of authors extending their private selves into the world via social media.
Sam Anderson in the New York Times discussing information overload, James Gleick’s new book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and the overwhelming inclusiveness of the internet on one hand and the restraint of the traditional almanac on the other:
Like the Web, the almanac aspires to be a total information delivery system – the source of every datum you will ever need. Unlike the Web, however, the almanac aims for exhaustiveness within clearly defined limits. It has a front cover and a back cover. Compared with the Internet, it feels wonderfully contained and stable – it is curated omniscience, portion-control Google. Much of its value comes from the empty spaces around its edges, the missing entries in its index, the silence that descends when you close it.
Do I wish (Don) DeLillo was on Twitter? No, that would be grotesque: the worst thing that could ever happen to my relationship with his books.
Boxer, Beetle author Ned Beauman in an interview with Ideas Tap. I agree with this in part: writers who trade in a sort of aloof authorial demeanour or carefully-constructed mystique will not be particularly well suited to broadcasting or interacting on Twitter. On the other hand, Margaret Atwood — a writer one could hardly accuse of being frivolous — apparently enjoys a certain repartee with her Twitter followers.
As for the question of Twitter’s impact on productivity, you can no more expect to get any writing done if you’ve got Twitter open than you would if you set up a typewriter in a middle of a party. But few sensible people would advocate that one should never go to parties.
I hope none of the above reads as though I’m being dismissive of Beauman (from the evidence of Boxer, Beetle he is an exceptional writer) — or that I’m being precious or defensive about Twitter, for that matter.
Canada’s National Post is running excerpts from Finding The Words, a new book of essays on writing — including a fantastic piece by historical and fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay on ‘authors in cyberspace’ and the consequent ‘disappearance of the space between author and consumer and between author and work’.
The piece goes beyond talking just about authors, though, and looks at the accelerating phenomenon of ‘self-exposure’. As Gavriel Kay says: “privacy as a value becomes eroded, or superseded by exposure as a value.” (Link via Jonathan Strahan, via James Bradley.)
The Read It Later blog analyses online reading patterns, specifically the times during the day when readers bookmark content for reading later, and the times at which they eventually get to the items on their reading list. Nothing startling in the results, except that it’s interesting to see how the patterns of reading on the iPhone and iPad (Read It Later is an iOS app, and it’s from this app that the data has been collected) resemble what I imagine are typical patterns for reading the newspaper: over breakfast, during the commute, on the couch after dinner.
I don’t use Read It Later, but I do use Instapaper, and I have a subscription in Google Reader for unread Instapaper items. I ‘star’ these unread Instapaper items in Google Reader during the day, assembling a kind of personalised newspaper for the moments later in the day when I’ll have a chance to read them. In a way, I’m the editor of my own newspaper, and the bloggers I follow and the people I interact with on Twitter are my reporters.
Every now and then I plan to shout “Great Caesar’s ghost!” at you all, just like a real newspaper editor.
(Blogging) encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.
On the contrary, a book is the culmination of this writing: it’s what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together.
The ever astute and ever linkworthy Mandy Brown on how we might distinguish blogs and books when comes the time that the world wide web is the native, natural home of the book.
Laura Miller surveys the role of the internet in recent contemporary (English-language) fiction, especially its power to emphasise character (and character flaws).
It is what the internet lures out of us – hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions – that makes it so potent and so volatile… the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it.
Mandy Brown on building things to last, on being digital caretakers, and on archiving our digital cultural memory.
There’s something charming about spam email prefixed with ‘Re:’. It’s as though the sender is being particularly sincere in responding to my queries about ‘raw power’ and ‘massive rods’.
Bronwyn van der Merwe from the BBC online and technology team runs through some of the choices involved in creating a new ‘global visual language’ for the corporation’s digital services. (Also worth a look is the BBC internet team’s post on regenerating the Doctor Who section of the site for the launch of the new series. If only the video content was available outside of the UK.)
I suspect this is probably a well-worn meme among bloggers, but in any case I thought I’d share a few of the eyebrow-raising search phrases that have somehow resulted in visits to this domain.
I trust you are now perfectly at ease, dear reader, that by viewing this blog post you are among the very finest company the internet has to offer.
I do appreciate the irony that by sharing this article on information overload I am directly contributing to your information overload.
“Hi, I am sad and dreary one.”
Least enticing opening line of a spam email ever.
According to Google Analytics, someone visited my website immediately after typing the search phrase “where to buy flatulence underwear melbourne australia”.
There’s nowhere I can go from there.
A screenshot of Grackle68k, a Twitter client for Mac System 6 through to Mac OS 9. I bet this will really annoy the dude I posted about in September who went back to System 7 precisely to escape this kind of distraction.
(retards.org, via Minimal Mac)
Freelance writer Riccardo Mori steps back in time to a Mac running System 7.1 (connected to an old iBook running System 9 as “a bridge between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’ world” of his regular setup) to avoid the shiny, internet-connected world of distraction that OS X offers: emails, RSS, spur of the moment research on the muddy muddy web. Great photo of his barebones setup; I felt instantly calmed (and envious).
If you overuse your CAPS LOCK there’s a good chance you’re senile, according to a new study. Judging by the comments on a typical YouTube video, there are a lot of people with really really really early onset dementia.
In the 1930s, author and entrepreneur Paul Otlet dreamt up an information retrieval system that seems to foreshadow the modern world wide web.
Spooky! Judging from Twitter Trends, Michael Jackson and the lesser known but similarly named “Micheal” Jackson died ON EXACTLY THE SAME DAY
In seeking to find the Latin for ‘hairy’, Googling “latin hairy” proved rather educational, if not entirely relevant